“Julie Through the Glass”: The Rise and Fall of the Mormon TV Commerical

As an American child of the seventies, certain television jingles will forever be burned on my brain: Juicy Fruit; Big Red; Doublemint. (The chewing-gum industry seems to have been especially determined to lay claim to my young neurons.) But there’s one tune that has proven more indelible than any of those, and it’s called “Just One Lie.” The ad opens on a plucky kid as he runs up the steps to his house, blithely finalizing the lie he’ll tell his mother so that he can go to the movies without permission. But when he opens the front door, reality falls away, and the paranoid delusions of his guilty subconscious take over, in the form of a troupe of shadowy, tap-dancing gangsters. “When you tell one lie, it leads to another,” they sing ominously, making spooky use of their flashlights. “Then you tell two lies, to cover each other. Then you tell three lies—oh, brother. You’re in trouble up to your ears…” By the time the real world reasserts itself, the kid is a sweating, babbling mess, confessing his crime before he’s even committed it. I loved the ad then, and I love it still.

“Just One Lie” was more entertaining than the cheap Saturday-morning cartoons it interrupted. But why was it there? The tag at the end offered a clue: “From the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” My family was Catholic, and I didn’t know a lot of people who weren’t; I didn’t have any idea what a latter-day saint was, and honestly I didn’t much care. I figured they were just another bunch of not-Catholics. As I learned when I was older, they’re the Mormons, and the Mormons are the filmmakingest of all faiths. The church made its first feature, “One Hundred Years of Mormonism,” in 1913, in large part to counter the trend of Mormons as villains in popular films and stories (such as the first Sherlock Holmes novel, “A Study in Scarlet,” which came to the screen the following year). “One Hundred Years” was the beginning of an enthusiastic film industry, mostly local to Utah, sometimes called Mollywood. Today, the annual L.D.S. film festival—it happens next week, in Orem, Utah—is in its eleventh year, and it includes a twenty-four-hour filmmaking marathon.

But television is where Mormon filmmaking has had the most impact outside of the Western states, and among non-Mormons. And the church’s best-known project has been a series of public-service announcements called Homefront, the first of which ran forty years ago this month; it’s the longest-running and most frequently broadcast P.S.A. series ever, and it’s also won the most professional awards (three Emmys, lots of Clios). The ads I remember from the eighties were part of a spinoff campaign called Homefront Jr., aimed at kids. But the main campaign was aimed at parents, and its mission was to promote family ties, with a special emphasis on certain key virtues: patience, listening, compassion. So far, so goody-goody. Over the past week, though, as I’ve watched as many of the Homefront ads as I could find, I’ve been impressed by how effective they are. To be sure, it’s partly because they’re simply well made: to convince skeptical television programmers to air the spots, the Homefront producers enlisted some of the top commercial (non-Mormon) filmmakers in the business; the “Just One Lie” spot, for example, was made by the same director, cinematographer, and choreographer who made the music video for Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” as was another delightful mini-musical spot called “Who Broke My Window?”

And the Mormon producers themselves knew how to write a script. One of the best Homefront campaigns, from 1978, was called “Turn It Around.” In one ad, a girl accidentally knocks over a grocery bag in the driveway, ruining a cherry pie; her mother looks annoyed, but then brings out two spoons so they can share the smashed remains. In another, three siblings, unsupervised in the yard, give themselves over to a deliriously messy mud fight; when their father gets home, he looks stern, and yells, “Stay right there!”—but then goes into the house to get his camera. Yes, it sounds like schmaltz, but the actual ads, which were based closely on the scriptwriters’ real experiences, understand the true abandon of children’s play, and are tinged with the regret that anyone knows who’s been angry with a child when they should have been kind.

Quite obviously, I was moved while rewatching these ads in large part because I’m a new parent, and because I’m a huge sap: the kind of person who is guaranteed to cry throughout any production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” regardless of its level of professionality. But some ads got me more than others. The morerecent Homefront campaigns are mostly cute and charming and fine. But they lack the raw moments of emotion that the early ads were so careful to capture: the flash of fear on a girl’s face as she waits to be scolded by an angry mother; the shock of disappointment on a boy’s face when his enthusiasm is quashed by a distracted father. It’s no accident that I thought of Thornton Wilder, because the best of the Homefront ads share the great strengths of “Our Town,” and of Wilder’s one-act play “The Long Christmas Dinner,” which fits several generations of family life into a single supper. They play off of their homey settings with undertones that are surprisingly dark, and find inventive ways to illustrate the ways in which the past and future continually intrude on an all-too-fleeting present.

Take “Try Again,” from 1979. The ad depicts the breakdown of a marriage, compressed into two minutes, and ceaselessly foils expectations by pairing the happiest moments with the worst. Or “Julie Through the Glass,” from 1981, which shows two young parents as they watch their newborn daughter through the window of the hospital nursery, and imagine the phases of her life. The look on their faces isn’t simply one of joy and anticipation. It’s also one of helplessness and fear—fear that life will slip by without their ever being able to fully grasp it; that their daughter’s youth will fly past before they ever get to truly take it in. While the ad doesn’t delve as deeply as Wilder does—that would be a tall order in two minutes of television—it’s a sharp reminder of how new life points in the direction of death. They’re already mourning the passage of times that haven’t yet occurred.

The aim of the Homefront ads, to be sure, wasn’t merely to promote good values and call it a day; they also served as a kind of soft proselytization. As one Homefront producer says in a recent documentary about the campaign, “We got to spend a lot of our time thinking: what could we put on the air that would soften their hearts to the church that we had invested so deeply in?” (Made by Kevin Kelly, the creator and producer of the Homefront Jr. series, the documentary unfortunately isn’t available online or on DVD due to copyright tangles.) Another producer notes, “Before Homefront began airing, when we did surveys asking people, when you hear the word ‘Mormon,’ what comes to mind, the answers were Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Osmonds, polygamists, racists. Those were the top four answers. After seven, eight, nine years of Homefront airing, when you asked the same question, the No. 1 answer was always family.”

But if the Homefront campaign sought converts and an image makeover, it was rarely heavy-handed about it. Aside from a few misfires, such as a 1972 ad in which a clean-cut kid rather smugly evades a pot-smoker, a flag-burner, a go-go dancer, and a protester holding a “Peace Now” sign in favor of hanging out with mom, the ads were careful to be inclusive and politically neutral. There are no shots of the Salt Lake Tabernacle or of missionaries on bicycles; no threats of heavenly judgment or promises of heavenly reward; no cameos by Brigham Young, Joseph Smith, or even Jesus Christ, save the title card at the end. They’re designed to be religious tracts that even an atheist could be drawn into. What makes them powerful, even for those immune to their secondary aims, is that the message is not some vague, superior, culture-war notion of “family values.” The characters in the best of the ads—the ones from the seventies and eighties—are terribly human, which is to say painfully flawed. The message is a gentle one: life moves fast, and failure is a daily part of it, and the solution is not to demand perfection but to make the best of our awkward selves, and, most of all, to have compassion and patience for the people we live with—relationships that are so difficult because they’re both involuntary and irreplaceable.

The Homefront series is now on hiatus; the church is continuing to focus its media efforts on its “I’m a Mormon” ad campaign, which began in 2009, and which is much more explicitly directed at promoting the church and burnishing its image. I can understand why they’re doing it, but I don’t think it works. As Stephen Colbert suggests in his Catholic sendup of the ads, the new campaign comes off as insecure, which the Homefront ads never did, and leaves viewers wondering why a religion requires such an extensive P.R. campaign. Here’s hoping the Homefront campaign makes a comeback—and this time with the dark edge and depth of feeling that once made it so haunting and memorable.

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.